Vestige
by Nerumi H
Summary: The earth has fallen into ruin, yet how can they abandon the Titanic that they've been so long the captains of? (Season spirit AU.)


.title.: **Vestige**

.summary.: **The earth has fallen into ruin, yet how can they abandon the Titanic that they've been so long the captains of? (Season spirit AU.)**

.characters.: **Jack Frost / Rapunzel**

.universe.: **Season spirit AU**

.summary.: **I've been on a roll lately thanks to Jackunzel Week, of which this is my third entry. It's for day 4.**

**Finally got Microsoft Word and its lovely capabilities. 2013 edition. Anyone else distracted by how smooth the cursor moves?**

**Enjoy!**

**X**

Another sunrise, another day. Another glow paints the barren earth with rotten inks, creeping impatiently across the earth for a destination to reach. As if by dipping into every crevice left by the rubble and the stagnant sea of erosion, it may find something that says the world is not on loop.

Rapunzel watches the big ball of fire rise into the sky. As always, its wavering rays and bright boasting reminds her less of the home where she'd once admire it, and more of the numbers it is geared with.

818 677.

The moon doesn't rise anymore.

Jack shortly kisses her to shake her out of it. Sometimes she can get so lost in the calculations that she'll – ironically - miss whole days, and then have to recount from the last event she recalls the best – 818 401, where she'd gotten married to him as a spirit, and sometimes from 640 575 when it's especially bad and she needs the memory of her own blood to pull her back to her senses.

She says, pointing at the sun where they sit, "Merida's lost her routine. She's going to confuse me one day and I won't know if it's a week later or a month."

Jack squeezes her fingers. His eyes drift over hers, a hesitant she has long learned is not all that uncharacteristic. His voice sounds so shivery, like she recalls water's surface to look. "Stop that. Please."

"Stop what?"

"Counting. It's – " He pushes back his hair. She's seen that movement so many times she knows exactly where the strands of silvery hair will fall amongst his fingers. Sometimes he'll tighten his hold and tug when he's especially agitated – he reminds her of a caged animal that once upon a time (814 377) she let out of the zoo. Before she released it, she had leaned to the bars and saw it pacing: the lazy twitches in his lethargic muscles, eyes blistered by the same sunlight, the world worn out where he continued touching a thousand times a day. He probably counted too. And then she had brushed the fence and they sprung into ivy, flourishing and fresh, and the lion barely knew what that even was.

She hasn't seen a lion in a long time. She's surprised she even remembers that comparison. Jack's good at recalling – he's had so less practise than the other three, becoming a seasonal guardian centuries after them, and he still sometimes calls her a kitten and tells Hiccup he's shivering like he's been electrocuted.

"It's hard to count," Rapunzel says, and lightly swings his hand in hers. She can illustrate his fingerprints out of sand, backwards, forwards, upside down and with her eyes closed. "It's one of the only hard things left to do."

"You always look out for that stuff."

She says what he's thinking, "It's just different from me being_ me."_

"We've had this conversation before…" Jack murmurs. He slouches in the dust, grinding his bare feet to the rubble – glass, iron, twisted things and bones somewhere far underneath. He doesn't hold his staff anymore since he's learned a long time ago to have his magic all in himself (she wonders if the staff had significance when he was alive), so his hands are both free to touch her other wrist. He's still cold. "Yeah. Never mind."

"I know what you mean. That's how you met me – Punzel with her arts and her painting and ideas. That girl was locked in a tower, watched the stars and dreamed big; she didn't restrict herself to little digits that lock off each day one by one by one." Rapunzel hums in an effort to stay light since that's the only resource that is left, while she twirls her hair. It's always been so long and gold – although it drapes in the dirt every day, and for a laugh that the gang keeps repeating, they wrap up in her hair to sleep, nothing changes anymore in their dead world when she sings.

Jack nods, smiling crookedly, but he's tired. "And then she and the world grew up and – "

"Found numbers, calculations, calendars, elements, atoms, genes, fiction, and secret codes."

"It forgot a lot more than that."

Rapunzel lowers her gaze, and falls into his chest. "It forgot how to take care of itself," Rapunzel sighs into his neck. "And how important its friends are."

Despite it all, she still finds comfort in him and still loves him. She knows his breathing and every ruffle of his shirt. She knows the diameter of every pale freckle and she knows the broken slits in his lips from his permanent cold. His fingernail grooves and the way his toes curl when he's mad and the way he'll grind his teeth and twitch his thumbs into his palms when he's trying not to cry. The exact amount of tiny silver hairs on his arms, every vein that glows near the surface, and the ways to make him smile the brightest.

But she has forgotten her family and where she lived, how she came to be and where she came from. She doesn't recall how she and Jack met nor the stories Hiccup has told. She can tell the exact angle of every curl in Merida's hair, but not how Merida died.

"There's ten digits and an infinite amount of combinations. Divide by zero, times by one... It's all hard in theory. A lot of it is just remembering." At this, a jolt of fear slides up her veins – for how long she's lived and all she's seen, this brand of terror can always send her fingers trembling. Time used to be her weapon, and now it has her at gunpoint.

She whispers, "And what if I stop remembering?"

Jack brings her close to him, emitting his own sigh that blooms icily against her neck. There aren't any good answers because she knows he's afraid of it happening too. "I won't let you stop," he assures her softly and she believes him, but there's a tiny quake – minute and buried beneath his skin, a twitch of muscle seizing his lungs for a second that long ago when she was youthful and optimistic and trusted him to make her happy, she wouldn't know to read.

She doesn't remember their first kiss or the first time he made her laugh. Maybe they have a legacy to be born of those lost stories. A new legend if anyone can ever hear again.

But they are all tied to the earth – Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter – and as it fades, so do they.

818 677. The world is slipping out beneath them, and he'll fall forever with her.


End file.
